


Summer Sunday and a year

by Merricat Kiernan (rosa_himmelblau)



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [48]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:47:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27401473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/Merricat%20Kiernan
Summary: Sonny's lost but he won't admit it.Vinnie's still untangling the past.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [48]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713
Kudos: 1





	Summer Sunday and a year

"But what were we doing in Maine?" Vinnie asked, and made a hash mark in the corner of the notebook he was holding. It was the third mark he'd made, and he was betting himself he'd have at least three times that number before the argument ended. Whether he'd have an answer to his question was another matter, and the only difference it made was whether they'd be having this argument again or would it drop off the top ten list. Either way.

"We weren't doing anything in Maine, we were just there," Sonny answered.

"What, did we get lost? You were driving," he added. That could apply to either the past or the present. Sonny was driving slowly down the street, reading addresses. Vinnie thought about asking where they were going, but that would have required changing the subject, and he wasn't finished with the one they were on yet.

"No, we didn't get lost." Sonny didn't elaborate.

"What I remember is, you were driving—why were you driving?"

"Will you shut up?"

Vinnie didn't bother to make note of that; it was too constant a refrain. There weren't enough hours in the day to keep track of every time Sonny told him to shut up. Shut up was Sonny's number one verbal response, that, or some variation of it. It made Vinnie itchy to quote Ring Lardner, who had clearly somehow been thinking of Sonny when he'd written his famous line.

He didn't quote Lardner. Instead he said, "You were driving, we stopped for hamburgers, I got a pack of smokes, and when the pack was gone, I fell asleep."

"Yeah, took you about an hour, you were chain-smoking." That—remarking on Vinnie's smoking—wasn't Sonny's answer to everything, but it was on the top ten. "You need to quit smoking," Sonny added gratuitously.

"Like you don't. And when I woke up, we were in Maine. And we were there for . . . a week?"

"Ten days." Sonny never wanted to talk about any of it, but he remembered every detail. Of course, a lot of what Sonny remembered, Vinnie wasn't sure ever really happened.

"We left New York and went to Maine for ten days." It wasn't that Vinnie didn't remember the time they spent in Maine; he just wanted Sonny to tell him that they'd gone there because Sonny wanted to spend some time by the Atlantic Ocean before they had to start west. They had stayed in a place called Blue Hill, right by the beach, and every morning Sonny would get dressed and leave the room, and go down to the beach. If he wanted to, Vinnie could go with him, but he was never explicitly invited. "Why Maine? It's not like we could keep going east—"

"What makes you think I knew where we were going? I didn't have a lot of time to make plans, you know." That was a concession, Sonny saying he didn't necessarily know what he was doing. Vinnie made note of it, but not in the notebook.

"So you were thinking maybe Canada?"

"You really want to know what I was thinking?"

"Yeah, I really want to know what you were thinking." The tone of Sonny's voice gave Vinnie the idea he maybe he **didn't** really want to know what Sonny was thinking, but it also told him he should probably find out.

Sonny sighed. "I figured I better be sure your head could **get** screwed back on straight before I got you very far from home."

Vinnie ignored the obvious jokes. "What were you expecting to happen in ten days?"

"I didn't say anything about ten days. That's just how long it took."

"For what?" Vinnie asked. "What happened?"

"You figured out we were in Maine."

Vinnie remembered that; it happened when he was looking at the postcards in the gift shop. He'd bought one, too, and had kept it for quite a while. "What did that prove?"

"It proved you knew you weren't in purgatory, which was a step up from when we left Brooklyn." They were stopped at a stoplight, Sonny looking at the street signs as though there might be more there than met the eye. Vinnie looked too, but saw only street names, and not ones he recognized.

"So how long were you going to wait?"

"The light's red," Sonny said, motioning at it as though Vinnie might not know where to look for a stoplight if not shown. "You think I should run it?"

"I was talking about Maine." Which Sonny knew full well. "How long were you going to wait before you decided my head couldn't be screwed back on straight?" Again he ignored the jokes; there had been plenty of screwing, none of it straight, and if it had anything to do with his head—

Well, no actual screwing maybe, but Sonny's hands had definitely been in places they didn't belong, not that Vinnie had had a single objection. Still, best not to go there, it would just derail the conversation.

"I don't know!"

Vinnie didn't push that one. He was pretty sure that, if it had come to it, they would have ended up spending a very long, cold winter in Maine, but he had no desire to try to make Sonny say so. "So you were going to call Rudy to come get me?"

"Either that or drown you. I hadn't made up my mind."

Vinnie thought about that. Sonny thought this would upset him—not the drowning part, which wasn't exactly a joke. The getting rid of him, one way or the other part. Maybe it should have, but Sonny's pragmatism didn't bother him. What the hell **was** he supposed to have done, should it have turned out Vinnie's suicidal impulses weren't situational, that his delusions couldn't be cured by a car and a grope and a punch in face? He couldn't guard Vinnie every minute, he had no easy access to whatever Rudy had been giving him to keep him calm and pliant. Would anyone believe that letting him kill himself was the better solution? "Given a choice, I'd prefer the drowning." He tried to say it as lightly as Sonny had tried. He was about as successful.

"Yeah That's what I figured."

The conversation was going downhill. Sonny made a right turn, then stopped in the middle of the street to look at addresses. Vinnie did not ask where they were going. It was supposed to have been dinner, but they'd been driving around for at least two hours now, with no food in sight.

"What came after Blue Hill?"

Sonny glanced over at him, noticing the notebook for the first time. "What, are you writing a book?"

"No, I'm not writing a book."

"Just be sure you spell my name right. And wait until I'm dead to publish it."

There were so many answers to that, Vinnie wasn't sure why he said, "Wait until you're dead? How will I know?"

He wasn't sure why Sonny laughed at it, either. "After Blue Hill came East Liverpool, Ohio and we were there for two days so you could sleep."

"Sleep? I slept for two days?" Vinnie remembered the drive down from Maine, taking back roads along the Canadian border, avoiding, if not New York, at least any place big enough for Rudy to have any interests in. He remembered driving, and smoking, and at one point, with the setting sun nearly blinding him, Sonny saying they needed to stop to get something to eat, Sonny's hand on his arm, telling him he needed to stop for a while. Where had he thought they were going? Vinnie had no idea.

"You drove eighteen hours straight from Maine to Ohio."

Yes, he had, with two rest stops, one of which included coffee. And they'd finally stopped in East Liverpool, which made Vinnie think of the Beatles and he'd started laughing and singing _I Wanna Hold Your Hand,_ which had Sonny looking at him funny, and he didn't hold Vinnie's hand.

"And I've seen you sleep for two days after a week of doing nothing but laying on the sofa watching TV," Sonny added pointedly. "Then we went to Chicago, to call your stepfather."

Vinnie had noticed that Sonny almost never called Rudy by name. That was interesting, but Vinnie didn't know what it meant, and he knew the answer he'd get if he asked, and it wouldn't be shut up. The response to that question would be Sonny looking at him like he'd lost his mind. Then he'd shake his head, and if Vinnie pressed the question, the answer he'd get would be, "What, are you nuts?" Sonny knew full well that the best defense was a good offense, but suggesting your opponent was a raving lunatic worked pretty well, too.

They'd only spent the night in Chicago; it was too connected a city for Sonny to feel safe there.

"Why didn't we just go to Canada?"

"Baby, we weren't avoiding the draft." Sonny was laughing at him. "You didn't have any I.D. Didn't seem so smart, going across the border with no I.D."

"What was next? After Chicago?"

"After Chicago was Norfolk, Nebraska."

"I remember Norfolk. Indian summer, hot as hell, and the air conditioner in the hotel room we stayed in that first night didn't work." He also remembered the long, cold shower they took together, but he didn't mention it. It had cooled down the outer heat, but not the one that came from inside. "And the one we moved to the next day, where we ended up staying, the guy in the room next door had two girlfriends."

Sonny was nodding. "And you had a thing for the blonde. What's this street coming up?"

Vinnie read him the sign. It didn't seem to be what he was looking for. He drove past it, anyway. "The **blonde**? I never saw either one of 'em, how do you know one of 'em was a blonde?"

"You don't remember the big fights, the guy kept telling her the bleach must've seeped into her brain?"

Vinnie couldn't wrap his mind around this latest fantasy of Sonny's. "Why would you think I had a thing for her? I never even saw her."

Sonny looked at him knowingly. "You **heard** her plenty."

"So what? We both did. We heard all three of 'em."

"Uh-huh, and every time **she** came, **you** came."

Vinnie blushed, though he had no idea if that was true or not—he certainly hadn't been aware of it. What embarrassed him, surprised him, was Sonny saying it. Though since their Roman holiday, Sonny had been less uptight. "Maybe it was the other way 'round," Vinnie suggested. "Maybe **she** had a thing for **me**."

Sonny laughed. "I didn't know your book was gonna be fiction."

Vinnie started to say that there was no book, nothing but this notebook he'd hoped might dispel the fog some parts of his life seemed to be perpetually clouded in, but Sonny seemed to like the idea of this imaginary book, and maybe that would make it easier to get him to talk.

"And the Miss Nebraska pageant," Vinnie prodded.

"Oh, yeah. Your girl washed out in the first round." They had actually gone to that, had bet on who would win, and, as Vinnie recalled, they'd both lost, though the girl Sonny had chosen had been a finalist. He'd been pretty smug about it, claiming all those years in Atlantic City had made him an expert in beauty pageants.

"After Norfolk was Dodge City?"

"Yeah, we were there for the winter."

Vinnie remembered that. They had stayed two nights in a hotel, then Sonny had rented a house for them. Sonny had loved it there; going to see the Boot Hill Museum, and the Gunfighter's Wax Museum, Fort Dodge, and even Longhorn Park. Sonny Steelgrave standing in the snow, looking at cows. He'd even bought himself a couple of pairs of cowboy boots, expensive black hand-tooled leather. It should have been funny, but Vinnie didn't remember it that way. It felt—old, in a nostalgic way. Like something that had happened before all the shit went down, before he'd ever had to mourn Sonny, when his biggest problem was remembering Sonny was the guy he was trying to put in jail. "That hotel was on Wyatt Earp Boulevard, wasn't it?"

"Vinnie." Sonny was trying to keep from laughing. "They got like eight hotels there and they're all on Wyatt Earp Boulevard."

Vinnie didn't know why that should strike him so funny, but he laughed with Sonny. "Hey, whatever happened to those boots you bought?"

"You threw one pair out the car window someplace near Rock Springs, Wyoming."

Oh, yeah, he had. A lot of that time in their lives had ended up littering the highways and byways of America. "What about the other pair?"

"I was wearing them. You tried to throw them out, too, but you couldn't seem to make up your mind if you wanted to take 'em off me first or not."

Sonny was laughing, but Vinnie decided it might be a good idea to change the subject. "Where are we?" The look Sonny gave him set him off again, and the way he slowly enunciated San Fran-cis-co kept him from being able to say anything for several minutes. "I know that! It's just you've been driving around in circles for the last two hours, I thought maybe we were lost."

"We're not lost, I'm looking for something." So he was lost. Vinnie decided not to pursue the subject. He flipped to the back of his notebook.

When he'd begun writing in this notebook, Vinnie had started at the end, writing down San Francisco since it seemed that was where they were going to stay put. They'd bought furniture here, anyway.

When had they first decided on San Francisco as a place to settle down? Oklahoma? Utah? Vinnie couldn't remember, but he remembered the conversation, remembered Sonny pacing around the room, looking out the windows, sounding almost desperate at being surrounded by nothing but dry land, no view of an ocean to be had at any price. "When we settle down, we can live in San Francisco," Vinnie had said, mostly to calm him down a little, and it had worked. It was something they had talked about a lot, when they were talking to each other, a dream they wove together. It was something they shared even when they were barely speaking; he remembered Sonny talking to himself, saying that when they got to San Francisco, wherever Vinnie lived, he was going to live as far away from him as he could, which sounded like just the kind of threat he himself would have made to Pete when he was nine years old or so.

Why San Francisco? Had Vinnie chosen it because it was the gay capital of the world? Maybe, probably that was some of it, but Vinnie thought it was mostly that he was a Brooklyn boy talking to a boy from the Bronx. He'd been to Seattle, and he knew Sonny had been to the West Coast on business, but when a boy from Brooklyn thought water and bridges that weren't in New York, what came to mind? That big orange bridge Sonny was so contemptuous of. It made the dream more tangible, made it something Sonny could see in his mind and cling to.

Before San Francisco had been Tacoma, Washington, and if it hadn't been for Rudy's deciding it was time to let bygones be bygones, Vinnie was pretty sure he and Sonny either would have had to pull up stakes again or they would have killed each other, because after two months the rain was making Sonny nuts, and Vinnie's nerves were strung so tight he sometimes felt like he was being tuned when Sonny touched him. They weren't even arguing anymore because they weren't speaking to each other, although they had both started talking to themselves—and not in a stagy, "I'm not speaking to you but I'm saying this for your benefit way," either. They moved around each other in the little furnished apartment as though they were adversaries, talked only to themselves, but occasionally punching each other. It was like some kind of slow-acting spontaneous combustion.

Before that was Casper, Wyoming, where they'd first had a big fight about avoiding Nevada—Sonny knew too many people there—and then they'd fought about staying in Wyoming for the second time—and that was the second time they'd had that fight, though not about Wyoming.

Gila Bend, Arizona (which Vinnie had chosen because he'd been driving for over eleven hours and because the name made him laugh and because although it was in Arizona, it wasn't Phoenix. What would Rudy be doing in Gila Bend?) was an uneventful week, except for Sonny disappearing in the middle of the night, twice, with no explanation, coming back late in the morning with bagels for breakfast, as though he'd broken into a bakery in the middle of the night and baked them himself.

He still didn't know where Sonny had gone.

Before Arizona was Utah for three weeks, where Vinnie did not tell Sonny he knew Prescott Wilson who maybe had as much money as Mel Profitt had and maybe had more, and who had once told Vinnie to come see him if he needed anything. They didn't get anywhere near Dawn Valley, but that was OK; Vinnie didn't need anything Wilson had.

Before Utah was Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, which had followed a huge fight while they were driving because they'd been on the road for twenty-five hours after leaving Oklahoma City, and Sonny wanted to stop in Montana and Vinnie wouldn't. They'd already stayed in Montana, and they were close to Idaho, close-ish, anyway, close enough to keep going. _"I don't want to stay in Montana, we've already stayed there, I want to go someplace we haven't been yet!"_

_"What the fuck do you care?" Sonny had asked, exasperated. "It's all the same place, what difference does it make?"_

_"What the fuck else do I have to care about?"_

And Sonny had given in, though he'd made Vinnie pull the car over so he could get in the backseat and sleep the last three hours of the drive. Apparently he thought that if Vinnie was going to fall asleep at the wheel and kill them, he should be well-rested for the crash.

Oklahoma City lasted only a week because Sonny couldn't find an apartment he liked, and his temper was short, and he wouldn't keep looking. It came after a week in San Antonio where they'd gone after New Mexico proved too hot. Vinnie had questioned the wisdom of going to Texas looking for cooler weather, but he'd kept it to himself. Sonny had wanted to see the Alamo.

It was surprising how many cowboys there had been in their travels, though maybe it shouldn't have been, given Sonny's city-boy, movie-goer fascination with the Old West. They would probably have stayed in Texas longer, if it hadn't been late June and hot as blazes. After all, New Mexico had been fine through the winter; it was summer that drove them out.

Well, fine if you didn't count the screaming arguments, the knock-down, drag-outs, Vinnie walking out with all his stuff and leaving it in the back of a church. Other than that, it was just another _having a wonderful time, wish you were here_ day in paradise. No, Land of Enchantment, that was it. Yeah, it sure had been enchanting. Vinnie hadn't been sorry to go.

Texas was also where Vinnie had bought the gun.

If there had been anyplace, any time, in Vinnie's whole life when he was out of his mind, it had to be Texas. It wasn't because he bought a gun; in Texas, buying a gun was practically a requirement. It was Vinnie's reasons for buying the gun. His first thought was that he wanted to do a little target practice, which wasn't too weird, right? He'd been a damn good shot, once upon a time, and he'd enjoyed it, when he was shooting at paper people.

His second thought was the crazy one, that he'd teach Sonny to shoot, that Sonny would get a kick out of it, and that had definitely turned out to be the case. Sonny had loved Vinnie's skill, had kidded him about wasting his chance to clean up at Coney Island, and had taken to shooting at beer cans like a sharpshooter. That last part shouldn't have been any surprise, what with Sonny's love of the Old West. (He complained about the twenty-two, of course. He'd have been happier with a six-shooter, one he could twirl on his finger, but you had to draw the line somewhere.) They'd had a lot of fun, out in the desert, blasting away at rocks and beer cans and litter. They had a great couple of weeks that way, buying a new box of ammo every day.

That was the not-crazy part of it. The crazy part was that they'd been having these fights, these knock-down, drag-outs that weren't any part of a work-out, they were just fury and frustration. They were driving each other crazy, and Vinnie bought a gun and taught Sonny how to use it.

Was he thinking that Sonny might shoot him? Was he hoping he might? Vinnie really wasn't sure. He spent so much of those years in a red haze of anger and despair, sometimes he wasn't sure what he was thinking while he was thinking it, so looking back, trying to figure himself out, was pretty futile. One point on the not-self-destructive side was that he'd made sure the gun was empty, that there were no bullets left in the box, before they went home.

It was interesting that he'd thought about Sonny maybe shooting him, but he'd never thought about maybe shooting Sonny.

"You're very quiet." Sonny sounded suspicious.

"I was thinking," Vinnie agreed. He didn't add that he was thinking about Sonny maybe shooting him.

"Yeah?" Sonny didn't say _that's what I was afraid of,_ but Vinnie heard it in his tone. "Now what?"

"You ever think about going back to Kentucky?" They'd spent a summer in a houseboat on Green River Lake near Columbia, Kentucky. Maybe because it was the first summer they were together, or maybe there was something soothing about the boat, but they hadn't fought much at all.

"I never think about going back, period," Sonny answered.

That seemed to be true, and Vinnie thought it was probably a good thing. He'd thought more than once about suggesting they go back there, but he'd always resisted the urge. One thing traveling all over had taught him was that when people wanted to go back to a place, too often what they really wanted was to go back to being the people they'd been in that place, and that was impossible.

"Why? Is that what you were thinking about?" Sonny asked.

"No, I'm just thinking about the places we've been, writing 'em down."

Sonny sighed. Vinnie wondered if he was going to change the subject. His options at diversion were limited by their being in the car At home he had a number of methods of detouring Vinnie's train of thought—suggesting food, or TV, or that they go out. Of course once, at a stoplight in Provo, he'd told Vinnie to get out of the car, which was pretty funny in a scary sort of way, since he hadn't been kidding. Vinnie had kept his mouth shut, not even pointing out that the car in question was his.

And once in Nevada, on their way out of a restaurant, he'd said nothing, given no warning, just suddenly punched Vinnie in the face, and kept walking as though nothing had happened. Vinnie couldn't remember what they'd been talking about, or, rather, what **he'd** been talking about that Sonny didn't want to. They hadn't talked about that, either.

Sonny Steelgrave was never going to sit on a sofa in front of a fire and talk about philosophy.

And that was really probably just as well.

"After Kentucky was North Dakota—"

"Which we left in the middle of a blizzard, right?" Vinnie remembered them throwing stuff in the trunk of the car, screaming at each other, Sonny not even wearing a coat, threatening to throw **Vinnie** in the trunk of the car if he didn't fucking get in, they were leaving, as though leaving North Dakota would somehow take them away from their anger and frustration. They hadn't even packed, just thrown clothes into the backseat, empty suitcases on top, yelling at each other the entire time until it simultaneously occurred to them that someone might call the cops. They stopped yelling until they were safely in the car—if driving through a blizzard in a fever pitch of rage could be called safe—

"Yeah, it was snowing," which was about what Sonny had said at the time, only now Vinnie laughed. "And after that was Montana. Are you hungry?"

"Mm. Yeah. Where're we going?"

Sonny looked at his watch. "Home. I don't think this place really exists."

There was a metaphor in there somewhere. Vinnie looked at his own watch; it was quarter 'til one. They'd been driving around longer than Vinnie had realized. "I don't want scrambled eggs for dinner."

"After North Dakota was Montana," Sonny said again. "And after Montana was Wyoming. The first time."

"I'm serious. If you're planning on making scrambled eggs, just find a drive-thru before we get home—"

"With all the construction," Sonny added.

Vinnie remembered that, the traffic backed up for miles on a two lane highway, backed up so far they couldn't even see why they were crawling along. Sonny got more and more unsettled by the agonizingly slow movement, first rolling down the window to stick his head out as though there wasn't enough air in the car, then yelling, "I could walk faster than this!" And the next time the car stopped, he got out to do so. He walked for a couple of miles, sometimes pulling ahead of Vinnie and the car, sometimes falling behind, until finally it seemed like they might get going again. Vinnie honked at him, and Sonny ran up to the car and jumped in, like they were on the lam.

Which they were, of course.

"And after that was New Mexico," Sonny said, "where you started researching the neighborhood bars—"

"Assuming we ever get home," Vinnie said, "the way you're driving in circles. And while I was checking out bars, you were screwing the blonde who rented us the house."

"Just once." There was absolutely no repentance in Sonny's voice, and even if there had been, the smile he shot Vinnie would have killed it. "After that was Texas—"

"So you could see the Alamo."

If Sonny heard the mocking tone Vinnie did nothing to keep out of his voice, he ignored it. "So I could see the Alamo, yeah, and where you bought a gun. Though at least you didn't use it to blow your brains out."

"Did you think I was going to?" Vinnie asked. That hadn't occurred to him, that Sonny might have been worried he'd kill himself.

"Not really, I made sure there weren't any bullets in the house."

Sonny made sure. Vinnie kept himself from smiling at that.

"And after Texas came Oklahoma, and we left after the fireworks—"

"That's right, it was the Fourth of July. We could see the fireworks from the balcony of the hotel room."

"You weren't watching any fireworks, you were making out with the girl who came in to clean up." If there was no remorse before, there was no resentment now. "That's why we were so late leaving."

"I thought you wanted to watch the fireworks," Vinnie said and immediately wished he hadn't.

"I did, but there weren't any; she went home, remember?"

It occurred to Vinnie that the reason he'd never been able to explain this relationship to anyone was that he didn't understand it himself.

"After Oklahoma was Idaho because you had to spend time in Idaho." Sonny stopped talking for a minute to laugh at that. "So we did, for two months. Two, three weeks in Utah because your car broke down—"

"Hey!" It was true, but the way Sonny said it always pissed him off.

"—again—" Sonny had to add.

"Listen, considering the miles we put on it—"

"—for what, the third time? Arkansas, Montana, Utah," Sonny ticked them off on his fingers, "yeah, third time—"

"Do you have any idea how many miles we put on that car?"

"Sixteen, seventeen thousand, I'd say."

"Yeah, something like that, on a rebuilt engine—"

"You're the one who's always claiming you did such a great job on it."

They'd had this argument before too, more times than Vinnie could remember. Sonny's attitude was very simply that cars existed to be driven and if they broke down from being driven "too much," they were obviously not good cars. Vinnie didn't feel like going through it all again. "I thought we were going home."

"We are."

"Well, unless we live in the bay now, you're driving the wrong direction."

Sonny swore at him briefly, put on his turn signal though he was in the wrong lane to turn either way, then turned it off. "After Utah came Arizona where we stayed because you wanted to look at lizards."

Vinnie realized that he had handed Sonny a remarkably effective weapon: if he didn't want to talk about something—like, say, the fact that he didn't know where they were and apparently had no idea how to get home again—he would "indulge" Vinnie by talking about, yes, friends, the one thing Vinnie had been trying to get him to talk about for months. And how could Vinnie possibly object to **that**?

"I remember Arizona."

"With the lizards."

There had not been any lizards, or at least Vinnie hadn't seen any. It was the name of the place that had tickled him because he was punchy from eleven hours on the road and no sleep the night before because Sonny had brought home a couple of stewardesses he'd met on his flight back from Chicago. "How many times did you fly to Chicago?"

"Eight," Sonny answered immediately.

"Why didn't I go with you?"

"Did you want to?"

Vinnie shook his head. "No, but— Did Rudy want to talk to me?"

"I think Rudy **still** wants to talk to you," Sonny said, a grin in his voice.

Vinnie smiled at that. He'd talked to Rudy, and Sonny knew it. "What did you talk about?"

"The meaning of life," Sonny answered immediately, and with no inflection whatsoever.

"What did he say about me?"

"You? You're the meaning of life now?" But the look Sonny gave him was a sweet, fond one. "He wanted you to come home. You could live in your old room—"

"My old room? He and my mother live in Phoenix. My old room's in Brooklyn."

"And we went to visit the lizards instead," Sonny said.

"I thought he wanted to have me locked up."

"He did, at first. Then he just wanted to see you, to see that you were OK, then he just wanted to talk to you. Then something weird happened."

"What happened?" Sonny had told him about the seeing-talking-are you OK? stuff, but not about anything weird.

"The last time I talked to him, I asked if your mother was worried about you, and he said that if we settled down someplace, he wouldn't do anything."

"What the hell?" Vinnie thought about that, told Sonny where he should turn—after the fact—and got called several names in Italian. Not very nice names, either.

They found a hamburger place that was still open, and Sonny pulled into the drive-thru, ordering without consulting Vinnie. Because of course he knew what Vinnie wanted, he always knew. He paid so much attention to Vinnie, how could he possibly not know?

Vinnie was still thinking about Rudy. The sack of food came in the window, Sonny passed it, and then the drinks, over to Vinnie, then found a parking space at the edge of the lot, away from everything, which Vinnie suspected was force of habit. Vinnie distributed the food, spilling their two orders of French fries out onto the flattened-out bag in one communal pile, ripping open little packages of ketchup with his teeth and squeezing them empty onto the bag next to the fries.

And suddenly he got it. "He thought you were blackmailing him."

"What?" Sonny asked, startled. "What're you talking about?"

"Rudy. When you mentioned my mother, he thought you were blackmailing him."

Sonny was chewing, looking at him. He swallowed, said, "What was the threat?"

"My mother. She doesn't even know I'm alive. If I called her, all hell would break loose." He didn't smile, though he felt like it. He didn't say that if his mother found out that not only had Rudy not told her he was alive, he'd also gotten Sonny for Vinnie, that they were now—um, _special friends_ —well, things would get very ugly for Rudy. It hadn't occurred to him what a great weapon just saying _leave me alone or I'll tell my mother_ would be, not that he could ever have done it. He didn't want his mother to know about him and Sonny any more than Rudy did. "She doesn't know I'm alive," he said again. "I never thought about that, about the position us ducking out put Rudy in. He couldn't show me to my mother, so he couldn't tell her about me. If I'd thought about it, we could have used this a lot sooner."

Sonny was staring at him with an expression from the old days, a combination of admiration and appalled amusement. "Yeah, sure, we should'a thought of blackmailing Rudy Aiuppo by threatening to tell you mom on him." And he burst out laughing. "Jesus, you are something else, you know that? I'm lucky he hasn't shown up here to solve all his problems."

_Maybe I learned to be pragmatic from you, or maybe I finally figured out that what they want doesn't make me happy and I just can't care about that._ That sounded childish, but it was certainly true. 

"You've got nothing to worry about. He's not going to do that, unless you think he's gonna pop me, too. Shit, look at all the hassle we could'a saved ourselves."

"Yeah, it was a pain in the ass, but given a choice between driving all over the country an' going to the mattresses against Aiuppo—I'd rather spend the summer in Kentucky."

_Special friends._ Sonny was now singing _See the USA in Your Chevrolet_ under his breath. _What other benign terms are there for—not what we are, but what everybody thinks we are? There aren't any terms for what we **really** are because what we really are doesn't make any sense. _"You only went to Chicago eight times?"

Sonny was licking ketchup off his fingers. "Yeah, why?"

"Because there were stewardesses more than just eight times." He'd never thought to count, but he knew there had been stewardess in the various beds more than eight times.

"What, you think you gotta have a plane ticket to pick up stewardesses? If we were anyplace near a halfway decent-sized airport, that's where I'd go."

"To troll for stewardesses?" Vinnie asked.

Sonny laughed. "Gee, Vinnie, when you put it that way, it takes all the romance out of it."

"Why stewardesses?"

"Because the next day they're on a plane out of town." Pragmatism at its finest.

"And why always blondes?"

"You like blondes. Besides, they weren't all blondes, just the ones I got for you."

_I like blondes?_ Well, it wasn't like Sonny didn't have reason to believe that. "But why—why were you bringing home stewardesses?" Vinnie didn't know why he was asking this; the answer was obvious.

Sonny leaned toward him, looking into his eyes with a knowing smile. "Hey, Vinnie, what can I tell you? Sometimes a guy just needs to—talk about aeronautical safety, right?"

Vinnie laughed at the seductive way he said it. "Oh, yeah, all the time."

"Right! And who better than with a stewardess, right?" 

"Yeah, of course. Now, please tell me that's not your pick-up line." Sonny just laughed.

They'd finished their hamburgers. Vinnie wadded up all the trash and banked it into the trash can. "You know how to get home from here?" Vinnie asked as Sonny started the car.

"Why, you think you can do better?"

"No, I just don't want to drive around all night."

"That's west," Sonny said, pointing out his window, "because that's the bay. Which makes that east—" he pointed past Vinnie's nose. "And we want to go south."

"You're sure of that?"

"You want to walk home, see if you can do better?"

They were back on the street, probably heading home, when Vinnie said, "You don't do it anymore."

"What?" Sonny asked, distracted.

"Bring home stewardesses. Did you pick one up when you came home from New York?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact I did." Sonny said it in that cool _wanna make something of it?_ tone. "I picked one up on my flight to Rome, too."

Vinnie had no doubt it was true. He tried to think about how that made him feel, but he didn't seem to feel anything. "I don't want you to bring home any more stewardesses."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I don't—" Vinnie paused to take a deep breath. "—want you to bring home any more women."

"Yeah? You want me to bring you a pilot next time?" Sonny's sincere tone half-convinced Vinnie he'd really do it. _No, but I'd pay good money to watch you pick up a guy, any guy._

"I don't want you to bring home anyone."

"Huh?" Sonny pointed at the street sign; it was their street. "See, I told you I knew where I was going!"

Vinnie shook his head, not saying anything.

He waited until they were in the parking garage, until the car was parked in its dark corner spot, its engine turned off. "I don't want you to bring home anyone."

Sonny looked at him, no expression on his face beyond a certain patient forbearance. "Yeah?"

Vinnie put his hand on the back of Sonny's neck, leaned forward, and kissed him. "Yeah."

Sonny shrugged. "Whatever you want, kid."


End file.
